Bible Dictionaries
Vain

　　VAIN.—1. ‘In vain’: Mark 7:7 (|| Matthew 15:9) μάτη, ‘a folly’). The Vulgateἡγοῦ θῦμα τοῦτο κάλλιστον εἶναι καὶ θεραπείαν μεγίστην ἐὰν ὡς βέλτιστον καὶ δικαιότατον σαυτὸν παρέχῃς).—Our Lord quotes here from Isaiah 29:13, where LXX Septuagintוֵחְּחִי) a statute of men which they have learned.’ How to account for וְחהוּ (= וְחהוּ in His Hebrew scroll of Isaiah,’ and that this was the received reading at the time that the Gospels were written. Such a solution of the difficulty would indeed be completely satisfying, but we must remember that the proposed reading is merely a conjectural one, and that no external evidence in its favour has been found. Other suggested explanations of the (it will be observed that the order of the last words is not the same in the LXX Septuagintμάτην in quoting the passage from Isaiah, we feel it best to accept the προσευχόμενοι δὲ μὴ βαττολογήσητε ὥσπερ οἱ ἐθνικοί. Mrs. A. S. Lewis (Expos. Times, xii. 60) approves of the derivation of πολυλογία.’ (cf. Meyer, Holtzmann, in loc). What He here condemns is the heathenish idea that a reluctant and ungracious Deity is to be worked upon by our saying the same thing over and over again (cf. 1 Kings 18:26), or by repeating His honours and titles (cf. Acts 19:34). In the words τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον εἰπών, ‘the same petition,’ rather than ‘the same words’; cf. Swete, 327). Our Lord’s prayers were the beginning of His ever-continuing intercession (Romans 8:34, Hebrews 7:25), and in the one instance reported of a prayer of considerable length which He offered as His disciples stood around Him (John 17) there is a repetition of the same expressions. With respect to the perfect form of words which He taught us in the Lord’s Prayer (wh. see), it is by our repeating it often that we come to understand its real depth, and how all our requests are to be brought under one or other of its petitions; and when we have not said it well, we should try to say it better a second or a third time. The true sense of our Lord’s saying is set forth in one of Bp. Wilson’s ‘Maxims of Piety’: ‘The eloquence of prayer consists in our proposing our wants to God in a plain manner’ (Maxims, 132), and still better by Hooker in the words, ‘The thing which God doth regard is how virtuous our minds are, and not how copious our tongues in prayer; how well we think, and not how long we talk, when we come to present our supplications before Him’ (Eccles. Pol. v. 32. 1); cf. Augustine’s letter to Proba, quoted by Trench (Ser. on the Mount, 255).

　　Literature.—Grotius, Com, on the Gospels; Expos. Times, xi, xii, ut sup.; Hatch and Redpath, Concordance to the LXX Septuagint